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Free Tribes 1 and 2 Downloads, DVD Forthcoming

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the teamplay's-finest-hour dept.

PoopShipDestroyer writes "In celebration for their upcoming game, Tribes: Vengence, Vivendi Universal Games is distributing the videogames Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 for free via FilePlanet.com on May 4th, and also on a special-edition DVD-ROM bundled with the newsstand edition of the June issue of Computer Gaming World magazine. The price is certainly right."

14 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Why FilePlanet? by Anti-Anti-Slash+Blac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why did they have to use a crappy POS like FilePlanet to distribute this? Sure it's free, you only have to pay FilePlanet $ for a fast connection and fast access to the files. Otherwise your stuck at something like 32kps transfer speed and waiting in line for 2-hours for the download to start.

    Patiently waiting for mirrors to show ups.......

    1. Re:Why FilePlanet? by trompete · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hopefully, some nice person will setup a bittorrent tracker. Pretty please? I hate those download sites more than I hate the New York Times registrations.

      --
      More than enough BS
    2. Re:Why FilePlanet? by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      * Eh? While I agree FilePlanet is a crappy distribution method, it isn't slow.

      You might have to wait in line for a while (personally, I've never had to wait more than 30 minutes even for super popular items) but I consistantly get 200-300 kBps when downloading.*

      I think you should count that waiting in, and 200-300kbyte/s can be slow if there's places where you would get it 2mbyte/s..

      the most annoying thing about fileplanets system is that it seems that the waiting is just artificial(as in, they would have the space on the servers), engineered you to just fess up and pay for the faster download. also they seem to negotiate exclusive/first distribution deals for some files, just to make it so that they are the ONLY place where you can get the file(at least for a short while). if they really are so out of bandwith for gods sake, but some torrents up!

      It's enough for me to just wait that it's on somewhere else, if they're in the business of providing downloads and don't want to do it then fuck them, they obviously don't want me to look at their ads or use their system then.

      fileplanet is slow in terms of 'when the file would be on your hd'.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    3. Re:Why FilePlanet? by realdpk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm with you. I was tired of searching around for files, with every site sending me through a dozen hoops. Fileplanet offered a low price ($7 or something per month) for full access to all of their files.

      On the technical side, the site works fine in Mozilla (except their search pages, they are a little funky. They work, just ugly.). They have some sort of IE ActiveX download control but I've never used it. Their cookies last a decent amount of time, so I only ever have to re-log in every month or so, and I just let Mozilla do that for me. I'm basically 3 or 4 clicks away from any file they host.

      People also ask me to grab files for them off of fileplanet, but I don't mind. It's usually at network parties where we'd all benefit anyways.

      Ultimately, I believe that paying for what I use is not a bad thing. Paying to have great access to what I use is even better. I've never had a slow download from Fileplanet for my subscription. I get the patches faster, and I get back to playing the game faster.

    4. Re:Why FilePlanet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, I really want pay to have faster access to the updates and patches that compaines should provide on their own pages free of charge. Maybe I can also get access to the worlds crummiest collection of files as well!

  2. Re:Free not Free Enough by Z0mb1eman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A valid point, except most games have a fair bit of licensed code that wasn't developed in-house; it's impossible for a company to just decide to release the source to everything. And what's the alternative - spending tons of man-hours on stripping all the licensed code from an old game, just to release it for free? Doesn't make much sense either way.

    --
    ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
  3. Yeah! Windows games for free! by mahdi13 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I think it's is great when companies release their games for free, and I'm a sucker and will probably be downloading these soon.
    But I haven't even booted Windows in months (except at work or when I need to work at home) and have been quite happy running Linux as many others are also.
    I doubt that they will release the Tribes2 for Linux (even though after Loki went under all thier ports went back to the original publishers) but I remain hopeful that they will release it. And with Fileplanets file tracking they will get a solid number of how many people ARE interested in Linux gaming. I'd think it would be a good judgement on the current state, who would want to download it more then once? Besides the obsessive downloaders...

    Give use the Linux version also, just so we can see how many downloads it gets.
    Also considering you can pick up Tribes2 for Windows for $10 and if you are lucky you can find one for Linux for sale at the low price of $40

    --
    "Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
  4. Re:Free not Free Enough by eht · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He wants his freedom at the expense of other peoples freedom.

    Others are "free" to choose how they want to distribute thier property, but that isn't good enough for him, he wants it to be free on his and only his terms.

  5. Serial? by pilot1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What about the serial number required for online play?
    Will it be provided with the magazine/download?

  6. Re:Free not Free Enough by I_Love_Pocky! · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Perhaps I haven't followed the development, but I don't seem to recall any of those source releases leading to further development. When is the last time you played the fully updated and evolved open source Doom?

    I just think your whole arguement is a little silly. If a company wants to give away its source that is fine with me. If a company wants to give away binaries and protect its IP that should be okay too.

    And who cares if this is just a publicity stunt to promote the new version of Tribes? It is still an really nice thing for them to do. Are you just opposed to the idea of doing something that may result in making money? Sorry to say, but they don't owe you anything. If you don't want their free gift, then don't take it. Just don't bitch about them not giving you more. You have no entitlement to their source code if they don't want to give it to you. If you want it, then reimplement the game from the ground up.

  7. TERRIBLE marketing scheme by droleary · · Score: 1, Insightful

    these kind of gimmicks always work, ALWAYS. i can say this with a high degree of certainty as someone who has spent more than 3 years playing first person shooters and delving into the modding scene of UT, UT2003, Q3 and espically HL.

    Then how can you be so very wrong? All this does from my perspective is piss me off that they're giving away things to Windows users but they couldn't be bothered to make some more money by releasing Mac and Linux versions. From both a business and "gimmick" perspective, turning these games into what is essentially abandonware at this stage is a bad move.

    1. Re:TERRIBLE marketing scheme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Why don't you just buy a windows gamming rig? Face it, I am a Linux supporter, but I realize that in most cases it isn't worth the time and money for some companies to port their games over to the Mac or Linux.

      They probably made what ever profits off of these games that they can, so giving it way for free probably is a good business decision. The games are old, most people have moved to the newer stuff, in the case of online titles probably allready has a lot of cheats making it worthless, it gets people to try these games and hopfully purchase their new tribes title. If some Mac company did the same thing would you argue aginst it?

  8. Re:Formerly Loki Version Available? by emag · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It especially doesn't seem right when you go to Loki's old site and read:
    01.30.02
    We'd like to update our customers on a few items as we prepare to close down.
    • ...
    • Many of you have asked about support and maintenance for Loki products. We have taken the following steps:
    • ...
    • all source code has been returned to the respective licensors. Although we cannot guarantee that each licensor will continue to support the Linux versions of their titles, we have made certain that they have all the necessary tools to do so. Don't be shy about letting them know your thoughts on the matter.
    ...

    Seems to me that it's more an issue of "*we* never supported linux, and don't want to start now, so we'll make a claim that we *can't* do it, and that'll shut them up", or at least, an employee who doesn't know what's really going on.

    Oh well, off to tuxgames.com to go buy something that really is going to work on Linux natively.
    --
    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
  9. Clowns like you are the reason ... by StupidKatz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Clowns like you are the reason that such games, BF:V, for example, require the CD in the drive all the time now. There's NOTHING that is needed to run the game on the CD, just that dorks like you abuse the system, leading to irritation for us all.

    Nice going.